Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?

Where/How/Spirit: Lecture IV: Bible and Wisdom I

Schmidt Number: S-1867

On-line since: 30th June, 2015

Bible and Wisdom I

Berlin, 12th November, 1908

There is in our culture certainly no document that has
intervened so deeply and so intensively in the whole spiritual
life as the Bible. One would have to write a history, not of
centuries, but of millennia if one wanted to describe the
effect of the Bible on humankind. If one completely wanted to
refrain from the influence of this document on the mainstream,
one would still find something immeasurable in the Bible
concerning the influence and the deep effects on the human
soul. Certainly, one may say that just our modern time presents
exceptionally many things, because one could show that today
not only those who stand on the ground of the Bible are deeply
influenced by this human document, but also that those who have
turned away from the Bible are subject to its influence. For
the Bible is really not only a document, although it is it in
the most particular measure, because it fulfils the soul with a
sum of images about the world and life giving the soul a
worldview, but the Bible was, for millennia, an enormous means
of education of the souls.

It
has meant something not only to the imagination, and means
something to it even today, but it is maybe important and more
essential what we must regard as an effect on the emotional
life, on the ways of thinking. There we must often admit today
that the Bible only developed the emotions, the sensations of
those who combat the Bible.

But
who looks around only a little at the spiritual life of
humankind, in particular at that of our western humankind and
that which is connected with it, that will note what an immense
reversal has taken place concerning the position of humankind
or, at least, of a big part of humankind to the Bible.

Those who stand still firmly on the ground of the Bible today
could maybe think too little of that to which is pointed with
it. They could say, even if there may be some people who turn
away from the Bible who state that the Bible can no longer be
that for humankind what it was for millennia, it is presumably
only a temporary phenomenon. We believe in the Bible; whatever
the gentlemen say who believe to stand on the ground of
science, it may seem to them fantastic — we rely on the
Bible! One could find this judgment among certain personalities
very much common, and it is only a matter of course. For
someone who is still able to take the happiness, the certainty
and the strength of his soul from the Bible cannot put enough
in the balance according to his character against those
phenomena that exist around him as criticism and refusal of the
Bible.

However, such a judgment would be rather careless. It would be
even selfish in a certain way, for the human being — if
he pronounces such a judgment — says to himself: the
Bible gives me this or that; whether it gives the same to other
human beings, I do not care about. — Such a human being
does not pay attention to the fact that humankind is a whole.
What single human beings experience, think and feel at first
flows down into the whole humankind and becomes common
property.

Somebody who says, I do not want to hear what the critics and
the scholars say about the Bible today, I do not care about it
judges only for himself. He does not remember whether also his
descendants, whether those human beings who follow him can have
the chance to gain such a satisfaction from this document if
criticism and science are about to take this document away from
humankind. The power of the authorities who are involved in the
life of this document is big and strong. It means, actually, to
act blind and deaf towards that which goes forward round one if
one wants to start only from the just characterised point of
view of naive faith, undeterred faith. Today one has to hear
what can shake the respect and the meaning of this human
document with our fellow men. The shock, the radical changes
that took place in the course of the last centuries with
reference to this document are enormous.

Still a few centuries ago, the Bible was believed to be
something that enjoyed unconditional authority; it was believed
to be of higher divine origin. This belief, this assumption is
shaken long-since and will be shaken more and more by always
new reasons. At first, neither our modern science nor the
present natural sciences turned against the old view of the
Bible. Already more than hundred years ago, the more
materialistic way of thinking — we are allowed to use the
expression, because we have often explained it here —
considered the Bible from the purely external point of view. We
speak about the Old Testament first. For centuries, it was
believed to be — like the New Testament — an
inspiration of higher powers. It was believed to be written out
of a consciousness that could rise to a sphere of truth to
which the sensuous consciousness could not rise.

The
first to shake this belief in the fact that the Bible was
written out of a higher human consciousness, that it is due to
another authority than to any authority of a human writer was
that one said to oneself: if one reads the Bible, it turns out
that it is no uniform document. In the eighteenth century, the
French doctor Astruc (Jean A., 1684–1766) wrote, one says, the
human beings would have written under the influence of higher
powers the chapters of the Bible that we call the history of
creation by Moses. However, we read the creation story and find
that single parts are not in accordance with each other; we
find stylistic and objective contradictions. Hence, we must
suppose that not a single author, Moses or anybody else, wrote
this document, because somebody who describes the conditions
successively as a single person would not bring in inner
contradictions.

I
can only outline all these contradictions: old documents would
be taken from different sides and combined by various authors.
These were the first objections against the Bible. We want now
to characterise the spirit of this kind of opposition against
the spiritual origin of the Bible, apart from that how the
things happened.

One
sees there how immediately in the beginning in tremendous,
overpowering pictures the creation is unrolled. In them, the
so-called Six-Day Work is told. One tells further on how within
this creation the human being originated, how he came to the
sin, how he developed from generation to generation. There one
notes that in the first parts, in the first verses, a name is
chosen for the divine powers, for God, different from the
fourth verse of the second chapter on. One sees there that
really these two names of the divine alternate, the Elohim and
Yahveh or Jehovah. There somebody must ask himself, should an
author have called the divine with two different names? Where
from this may come? He says to himself that that or those who
put together the document finally found old traditions or also
old documents which they interlinked and formed a whole from
them. The one may come from this tribe, the other from that
tribe, and one interlinked them. This one makes itself
noticeable. Starting from this one notes, going on, that
similar and other contradictions appear.

Thus, one got around to separating and tearing the original
documents in different pieces. If today anybody wanted to put
together a Bible from the different pieces and fragments from
which one thought that it must be composed, if anybody printed
with blue letters everything that one counts among one
document, with red letters what among a second, with green
letters what among a third and so on, then a strange document
would originate. However, it has already come about — the
so-called Rainbow Bible!

The
ancient, venerable document is there, one would like to say,
disassembled in the single pieces from which it should be
composed. The Bible is, of course, a document of which one
believes, however, to be able to prove that it is due not to
Moses, but that parts of it originate from this or that
clerical council in relatively late time. Other parts of the
Bible are put together from legends and myths that one gathered
from here and there from religious views of this or that
school. What became a whole this way cannot be believed to be
something that was brought into history with a raised human
consciousness that is able to behold into the spiritual
worlds.

However, nobody is allowed to believe that these both talks,
which I have to hold today and on Saturday, are intended to
lower any way the diligence and the sedulity of the works just
only briefly outlined. To somebody who knows the spiritual
means that was used to tear the Bible to small pieces and to
explain them, the diligence and the sedulity and the skill of
the researchers of all these works become apparent. They appear
to him as the most tremendous that was maybe performed in
science. In relation to the formal, in relation to the
industrious research one cannot find anything comparable. If we
look closely at the result of this research performed by modern
theologists, so just from those, who due to their profession
believe to stand on the ground of Christianity, we must say to
ourselves, it must cause another relation to the Bible as it
was for centuries. If this research comes to fruition, the
Bible — many things had to be discussed to reason it in
detail — cannot longer exist as the document that
comforts and raises the human beings in the saddest problems of
life.

Apart from that, numerous human beings have looked around in
the fields of scientific research, in geology, in the
developmental history of animals and plants, in the history of
civilisation, in anthropology and so on. These human beings are
hardly able to conceive anything reading the Bible. One has to
be also fair in this respect and not position oneself simply on
the ground of naive faith and say that this signifies nothing.
They are often those who are the most conscientious ones in
their feeling of truth, in their thirst for knowledge. They say
to themselves, I see that research standing on firm ground has
found

That the earth developed throughout geologic periods,
That the earth developed from a mist of higher temperature to
the present form,
That the inanimate develops and from this inanimate the living
being,
That everything developed from the simple up to the most
complex being, the human being,
That the forms of civilisation ascended to the modern complex
forms.

Numerous human beings say, if we see which tremendous
geological periods were necessary to receive the earth when it
had not yet produced amphibians nor mammals, if we survey all
that and open ourselves to that, what shall we to do if the
Bible tells us that the world was created within six or seven
days? We have no use neither for the creation in six or seven
days nor for anything else. Which use are we able to make of
the Flood, of the miraculous rescue of Noah if we read that
Noah brought so many animals in the ark, and so on? —
Thus, it happens that some human beings gifted with dignity and
serious sense of truth oppose so sharply and vigorously against
the Bible based on the modern scientific viewpoint, in so far
as it wants to extent to a worldview. All that exists in our
worldview. We are not able to deny all that.

However, there the question arises: does one take all things
really into consideration that are to be taken into
consideration in relation to the Bible if either the first
viewpoint, the historical one, or the second, the
physical-historical view is asserted? There one has to say that
already the third viewpoint exists in relation to the Bible, a
viewpoint that develops from that real research method and
human viewpoint that is characterised in these talks as the
spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic one. We have to deal
with this viewpoint in relation to the Bible today and the day
after tomorrow. What a viewpoint is this? One often says today,
the human being is not allowed to rely on external authority,
he has to approach world and life without presuppositions and
to investigate truth, and one believes to insult just the Bible
if one takes up such a viewpoint. Does one really insult the
Bible with it? One can compare the spiritual-scientific or
anthroposophic viewpoint to something that happened to humanity
concerning something else, even if less significant, some
centuries ago. We come to an understanding of the
spiritual-scientific viewpoint concerning the Bible the
easiest, if we compare it with the radical changes in relation
to the view of the earth.

There we see that all schools, the lower and the higher ones,
taught about the external nature in the whole Middle Ages
following up old writings, indeed, writings of a great
personality, of the old Greek philosopher and naturalist
Aristotle. Thus, if you could go back with me to the sites of
the spiritual life of the older time, you would find that that
was not communicated in the old schools and training centres
which was found in laboratories, but which was printed in the
books by Aristotle. Aristotle was the authority and his books
were the Bible of the natural sciences at that time. Where one
only communicated and taught what Aristotle had already said
about the matters. Now the times came when a new aurora arose
concerning the view of nature, the new way of the physical view
of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei and all the others up to now.
What was the basic feature of this aurora? While one had taken
before Aristotle as a firm starting point, and spoke about
nature as he had spoken, now Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei
used their own senses of observation and research. They
themselves looked at nature and investigated what life could
show them. Thus, they wanted to describe and explain nature
according to that which they themselves had seen. There they
came into conflict with the teachings of Aristotle's strict
believers.

It
is more than a mere anecdote, it means the deep truth of a
process that happened at that time: one tells that a believer
of Aristotle was asked to have a look at a corpse and to
observe that it is not right that the nerves go out from the
heart — as Aristotle teaches — but from the brain.
The believer of Aristotle was persuaded to look at this. Then,
however, he said, if I look at this, it seems that nature
contradicts Aristotle. However, if nature contradicts
Aristotle, I do not trust nature but Aristotle. — Natural
sciences faced tradition that way. The view of the researcher
was rejected in the light of that which was reproduced and
repeated as tradition for centuries. If we read Giordano
Bruno's writings, we see the opposition against Aristotle out
of the new spirit that tells and explains what the human being
himself should see.

We
look at the whole matter again differently today. We face the
immediate scientific observation and Aristotle differently. We
know that a lot of that which was read out from him in the
Middle Ages was only an ambiguous interpretation of his
writings. Aristotle was a researcher out of the spirit of his
time who looked immediately into nature and communicated what
he was able to say. If we understand Aristotle correctly, if we
can defer to what he said, then he does no longer seem to
contradict the immediate scientific observation, as he seemed
to contradict at that time. Then we can become his admirers
again, because just concerning the origin of the nerves from
the heart instead of from the brain, it becomes apparent that
he meant something else, namely something that is still correct
for our time.

In
a quite similar way, the spiritual-scientific research faces
not only these documents — the writings by Aristotle
— but also the western original document, the Bible. What
has happened in relation to the observation and investigation
of the external nature since the sixteenth century takes place
again in relation to the investigation of the spiritual
undergrounds of the world. Out of the spirit of that research,
I have characterised in the last three talks, how humankind
tries to penetrate again into those worlds that are not
discernible by the outer senses. However, they are discernible
to the higher developed senses of the human being, to the
spiritual senses of the human being with which we can behold
also in the spiritual world as we can see with the physical
senses in the physical world.

It
is not necessary to keep on explaining because I have often
enough said that the human being is able to develop the forces
in himself that he can perceive not only the sensuous things,
but that he can perceive a spiritual world between and behind
the sensuous, a spiritual world that is much more real than the
sensuous world. With good reason, humankind had forgotten the
methods of spiritual research for a while. The big progress,
the big conquests in the physical world were done because the
instruments were perfected in such a way, as it was the case
during the last centuries. However, if one thing extends in the
human nature, other abilities take a backseat. That is why we
see how during the last centuries the scientific methods
blossomed for the external physical world of facts. Never were
instruments that are more stupendous invented to pick up the
secrets of nature and to investigate her principles. The
concerning abilities were extended and perfected tremendously,
but those abilities have withdrawn with which the human being
is able to behold into in the spiritual world. Hence, it is not
surprising that the human being was convinced that the
spiritual could also be explained from the material
existence.

However, we stand before the dawn of an epoch today when
humankind becomes aware again that there are still instruments
and tools different from those in the physical and
physiological laboratory where they are used so excellently.
Indeed, we have to do it with an instrument that differs
thoroughly from the other. We deal with the basic and original
instrument that we have to see in the human being himself. We
get to know the human being by the methods of concentration and
meditation in the course of the winter. These are other methods
that the human being can apply to his soul and by which he gets
around to seeing the environment unlike he has seen it before.
He can get around to saying to himself: I am like an operated
blind-born who could deny the colours and the light of the
world before. — However, the moment had now come that he
himself could see. Now he could see that something else is
behind that which the senses and the mind perceive. Now he sees
into the spiritual things; now he does not know, not
hypothetically, by speculative philosophy that the sensuous,
the material is only like a compression of the spiritual, that
that which we see with the senses relates to something
spiritual behind it as ice relates to water. The water is thin,
the ice is solid, and somebody who is not able to see the
water, but can see the ice would say, there is nothing round
the ice. — Somebody, who can see only with the senses,
states that there is nothing but sensuous processes, nothing
but sensuous events everywhere.

However, we must penetrate into this supersensible field, into
these supersensible events, and then we can recognise and
explain the spiritual. Who has not developed spiritual ears and
eyes sees nothing but compression — like the ice in the
water — all over the world, as well as the primordial
mother of substance, the spiritual in which the sensuous is
only embedded does not appear to him. If the geologist shows us
how, for example, a human being could sit on a chair in the
universe and could watch how the world has developed: the
external sensuous view would be as the natural sciences
describe it. Spiritual science has to object nothing to that
which natural sciences have to say in the positive sense.
However, it becomes apparent to someone who is in the right
know of the physical science that before the first forming of
the physical the spiritual was there. There it becomes apparent
how the progress became only possible because the spiritual
helped, and that the spirit is mostly involved in the
development.

So
this spiritual worldview points to the fact that the human
being can make himself the instrument of the investigation of
the important bases of the world, and, finally, our view gets
around to investigating the spiritual original grounds and
beginnings independently. Thus, spiritual science stands there,
independently of any document. It says, we do not do research
in a document first. We do not do research as it was done once,
in the books by Aristotle, we do research in the spiritual
world. We adapt ourselves in such a way: what you learn as
usual school geometry, the Euclidean geometry, was written down
in its first beginnings by Euclid, the great mathematician.
Today we can accept it as a document and understand it
historically. However, who learns geometry at school today, is
he still learning after the elementary book of Euclid? One
works, learns, and recognises by the things themselves. If one
constructs, for example, a triangle, the internal lawfulness
appears to the mind out of the thing itself. Then with that
which you have gained in such a way, you can move up to Euclid
and recognise what he already wrote in his textbook. Thus, the
spiritual scientist does also research, regardless of the
books, only with his organs how the world has developed. He
finds the development of the world, the development of the
earth at that time before the earth crystallised in its present
form. He investigates the spiritual processes and finds how at
a certain point our mind starts in the earthly existence; he
shows that the human being appears first and has not developed
from subordinated creatures, but that he was first there as a
descendant of spiritual beings.

We
can go back to former times when still the spiritual primordial
grounds existed. We find the human being connected with these
spiritual processes, and only later, the lower creatures
develop besides the human being. As well as in the development
generally certain things remain behind and other advance, the
lower also diverted from the higher. The spiritual researcher
knows that spiritual organs can be developed by methods that
the spiritual researcher is able to show.

Thus, the spiritual research teaches the origin and evolution
of the world according to principles which are independent of
any document, only out of own principles, as well as one learns
mathematics regardless how it has developed in the course of
history. In the same way as the researcher has appropriated
knowledge of this wisdom, he approaches the Bible. He looks at
the Bible. It becomes apparent now, why there are
contradictions in the Bible from the viewpoint of the
historical-critical biblical studies as well as from the
viewpoint of scientific research. Both viewpoints come from one
big error that originated from the fact that one thought
generally to be supposed to understand the truth of the Bible
from the viewpoints of physical-sensuous perception. One
thought that it is possible to approach the Bible with such
criteria. One did not yet have the research results of the
anthroposophic spiritual science.

I
want to show with single examples what I have just said.
Spiritual science shows us that we come investigating the
earthly creation with the methods of geology et cetera only to
a certain point, and that then the human development seems to
proceed backwards in the uncertain. Why? The sensuous science,
may it hope it ever so much, will never be able to pursue the
human being back to the origin, because sensuous science can
find the sensuous only. However, the mental and spiritual have
led the way of the sensuous in the human being. He was soul
first and at even former times, he was spirit, then he
descended to the earthly existence. Only as far as the physical
life is involved in the descent of the human being in the
earthly existence, natural sciences can show this course of
development.

We
cannot investigate the soul life with the usual forces of the
sensuous observation. Geology can also be no guide to us. It
gives us the investigation of that which remained behind as
sense-perceptible matters. It can only say what one would see
if anybody sat on a chair in the universe and saw everything
that developed on earth. Spiritual science does not defer to
this. However, one must have developed spiritual eyes and ears
to see the human being as a spiritual being in primeval times.
If one does not have these organs, the soul and the spirit of
the human being disappear. However, if one has the spiritual
eyes, the sensuous disappears, and the spiritual picture
originates. One cannot see this, however, in the same way as
the sensuous. One must appropriate quite different concepts of
knowledge if one wants to go back to such primeval times. What
one sees developing there from the human being when it was only
a soul does not appear in sensuous concrete perception as the
external sensuous world offers it. This appears to us as
pictures. Our consciousness becomes a picture consciousness, an
imaginative consciousness by the development of the internal
forces of the soul. Then the consciousness is filled with
pictures. We see in another condition of consciousness, what
has happened at that time, now in pictures. Pictorial is that
which goes forward inside of the seer.

The
rudiment that still exists of the seer's gift is the dream.
However, it is chaotic. The vision of the qualified seer also
exists in such pictures, but these pictures correspond to
reality. It corresponds to the condition as the
physical-sensuous human being can make a distinction whether
his mental images correspond to reality or are only fantasy.
Who wants to stop with the sentence: “The world is my
mental image” and “the external things only
stimulate the mental image,” to that I might propose that
he should have a piece of glowing iron in his nearness and feel
how it burns. Then he has to leave it and feel whether the mere
mental picture still burns in such a way. There is just
something that makes a distinction between the mere mental
picture and that perception that is stimulated by the external
object. Hence, one is not allowed to say that the seer lives
only in the phantasms. He has just so developed in this field
that he can make a distinction what is a mere speculative
fiction, or what is a picture of the reality of a
spiritual-mental world. The pictures become the means of
expression of a spiritual-mental world. If the seer looks with
supersensible senses back at times, before there are sensuous
objects, the true spiritual beings and events present
themselves. The spiritual researcher speaks not about forces
that are abstractions, but about real beings. As to him, the
spiritual phenomena become truth and beings, and the spiritual
world becomes populated again by spiritual beings.

Imagine the primeval development of the human being when a
force or being intervened in his evolution, in his whole figure
that this being or force differs certainly from other beings
who have intervened even earlier. We can trace back the
spiritual-mental of the human being who is quite supersensible
even further; we can trace back it in even higher spheres where
we find even higher beings. If the spiritual researcher
approaches the beginning of the Bible, it becomes apparent to
him that the pictures are exactly given which show the
mental-spiritual in the development of the human being, before
he has come into the physical life. The spiritual researcher is
able to say to himself — if he finds his own imaginations
again in the external documents — that he recognises them
as truth. If he goes back now to the times when the human being
was connected with the even higher spheres, he has to choose
another name for these basic beings, and he finds really that
the passages which lead the way of the fourth verse of the
second chapter have another name of God. It complies exactly
with the results of spiritual research that a new name of God
appears from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. Thus,
we are as spiritual researcher in the same position in which
today an expert of geometry is. He can find geometry out of
himself, and then he appreciates the work of Euclid who found
the same. Thus, we see the development in the marvellous
pictures of the Old Testament, and now something extremely
strange appears. The text of the Bible becomes light and clear,
as it could not become with the scientific critics.

A
researcher said: what the elohim did must be due to a side
different from that which comes from Yahveh If anyone wants to
apply that seriously, it is weird. We want to try it. Imagine
this passage in the Bible: “The serpent which was the
most cunning of all creatures the LORD God had made asked the
woman: Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any
tree of the garden (Genesis 3:1)?” If you read
“God” instead of “Elohim” or
“Yahveh,” it is not translated correctly. It is
weird. In the original text you read, “The serpent which
was the most cunning of all creatures Yahveh had made.”
Where you read, “Is it true that God has forbidden you
... you read “Elohim” in the original text. In the
translation, the woman keeps on saying “God.” Then
in the eighth verse, one says, “The man and the woman
heard the voice of the LORD God.” However, you read in
the original text, the voice of the Yahveh God. — Thus,
we have now put together the story of the serpent, so that it
becomes explicable that those who used the names
“Yahveh” or “Elohim” meant different
beings. According to the opinion of the Bible critics, this
comes from different traditions.

The
passage “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat
from any tree in the garden?” comes from the Elohim
tradition. — You see, the Bible is really so composed of
pieces that even in the middle of the sentences the different
traditions are taken together.

If
you approach the Bible with spiritual-scientific research, then
you recognise that this must also be that way. There is talk of
the fourth verse of the second chapter that the world creation
goes over from the elohim to the Yahveh God. He is that power
which unfolds everything that happens then up to the Fall of
Man. Spiritual science shows that Yahveh is that God who speaks
within the human being in our ego, he is the I-am. This being
of the I-am causes everything that is said from the fourth
verse of the second chapter on. This being, Yahveh, who
intervenes now, is a being who belongs to a former development,
but seceded ... (gap in the transcript). Hence, there is talk
of the Yahveh God. However, the serpent knows nothing about
Yahveh; therefore, it must turn to that which is of its own
substance, up to the moment when this takes place which has
just to take place by Yahveh. Only in the eighth verse of the
third chapter, the name Yahveh appears again.

Thus, you get the consciousness by spiritual research that the
Bible is a document in which nothing is accidental. A modern
author may ask himself, why should this God not assume another
name? — The ancient initiates do not have these stylistic
forms of the modern authors. Where exactly and precisely should
be spoken, you cannot talk in any stylistic form. What there is
written and what there is omitted has its meaning. If the name
Yahveh appears and if it is omitted, this means something
highly essential. However, you must carry out the principle to
read the Bible extremely exactly. Read the Bible if you have
it! Read the Six-Day Work. You find the passage, if you keep on
reading from the first verse of the second chapter to the
Sabbath, “When the LORD God made the earth and the
heavens...” One interprets these verses normally as a
hint to the preceding, as if the Seven-Day Work had been told
and one still said now, the Seven-Day work was made in such a
way. — “This is the story of the heavens and of the
earth after their creation,” and then, “When the
Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis
2:4).

Who
studies the original text, detects the following: The fourth
verse of the second chapter does not refer to the preceding,
but to the following; even as later — in the chapter
after the Fall of Man — “This is the list of Adam's
descendants” (Genesis 5:1) refers to the following, to
the next generations, to that which originated from Adam. This
is said in the same way as: which follows there, “This is
the story of the heavens and the earth after their
creation” (Genesis 2:4). Here the same Hebrew word is
used. Someone who reads exactly knows that the creation of the
spiritual world is described from the words “In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to the
third verse of the second chapter. Then from the fourth verse
of the second chapter on it is said: after the heavens and the
earth were created the following is described. It is the most
wonderful transition if one understands the matter, from the
Six-Day Work to the following. Who gets involved in these
matters finds that no better composed book exists than the
Bible, in particular its oldest parts. The confidence that one
is able to approach the Bible without spiritual research, that
one is able to approach it with external documents has
dissolved this perfect and harmonious work, so that it seems to
be composed of nothing but pieces and fragments.

One
also has to follow up on the principle to read the Bible
exactly and to have it. One does not have the Bible if one has
only the text that suggests what it depends on. One must have
the principle to go into the Bible. It is told to us during the
fourth day of the Six-Day Work how the sun and moon originate,
how the sun and moon cause day and night (Genesis 1:14–18).
Already before, however, it was spoken in the Bible of day and
night (Genesis 1, 5). One can deduce from that: day and night,
which depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 14–18), cannot be
meant with “day” and “night,” which do
not depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 5). Here one can see
a palpable tip where the Bible speaks of the sensuous solar day
and the sensuous solar night. These originate due to the
rotation of the earth around the sun. However, we can see,
where the Bible points beyond this sensuous day to the
supersensible, the spiritual.

Those who could investigate the Bible spiritually said always
to themselves if anyone has the visionary gift and can find the
sense of the Bible in reality, this sense of the Bible must
have come also from visionary gift. If we are able —
because our soul has put itself in another state of
consciousness — to look into the tremendous pictures of
the Bible, then we know that the writer must also have been
under the inspiration of the spiritual world. We may probably
say: the time begins when one should understand more and more
that there are four levels to look at the Bible today.

The
first level is that of naive faith. It takes the Bible with
undeterred certainty and anticipates nothing of the objections
that are made against the Bible today.

The
second level: these are the clever people, the Bible critics,
who find — either by investigating internal
contradictions or by the scientific point of view — that
the Bible was the primitive legend work of a humankind not yet
doing research. They are way beyond the Bible, they do no
longer need it, and they attack it from the most different
directions and say: it was good for the childish humankind.
Now, however, humankind has outgrown the Bible. — These
are the clever ones, the freethinkers.

Then there is the third level: the human being outgrows this
cleverness. Indeed, the human beings of this level are also
freethinkers, but they are way beyond this second point of
view; they see symbolic and mythical covers of inner soul
experiences in the stories of the Bible — the Old and the
New Testaments. You see what the human soul imagines shown in
the Bible in symbols in the abstract. Some freethinkers have
been forced to this attitude. They had to transform the
viewpoint of the freethinker into that of the mythical
symbolist.

Then there is the fourth point of view. This is that of
spiritual science I have characterised today. The day after
tomorrow we follow up on this spiritual-scientific viewpoint.
It shows the spiritual facts again in simple descriptions,
indeed, in such a way as one can see these spiritual facts in
imaginations. These are the facts that are described in the
Bible.

Someone who had to leave the naive viewpoint and has become a
clever person or maybe a symbolist as researcher may get to the
viewpoint on which the spiritual researcher stands, and then he
can become able to take the Bible again literally, to take the
words literally in a new sense to understand them really.

For
centuries, one did not criticise the Bible in reality. The
Bible critics have fought against their own imaginary creation,
against that which they themselves have made of the Bible. The
adversaries of the Bible are such even today; they fight
against their own imaginary relation, against that which they
believe to understand of it; they do not affect the Bible at
all. The Bible can be taken literally, one must only understand
the words correctly.

There is a certain tendency today that turns against such a
remark: not the letter, the spirit must decide. “The
letter kills, the spirit brings back to life,,” and you
name it from certain relations of the letters.

I
wish we could bring the real Bible letter of the world again as
soon as possible. The world would be surprised about the
contents of the original text. As something completely new, it
will appear to humankind. One is not allowed to peddle the
saying around: the letter kills, the spirit brings back to
life. It is usually the gentlemen's own spirit that is
reflected in the letters
(Faust I, v. 578–579).
That applies to the symbolist in particular. If he is trivial,
he puts something trivial into the symbols; if he is witty, he
puts something witty into the symbols. It is with this word like
with Goethe's words:

And
so long as you don't have it,
this: “Die and be transformed!”
you will only be a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

These words suggest how the human being should come beyond the
sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would
take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has
ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical.
That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have
the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find
which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates
the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the
other: who does not have it, this “die and be
transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark
earth.

I
could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible
and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards
the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may
guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a
recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall
find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual
science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible,
and then one experiences what many have experienced out of
spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate
them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with
the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what
is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are
still other contestable passages, and one comes to the
viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep
spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was
integrated as something inorganic. — If you go on, you
discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you
yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the
matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have
believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained
compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one
that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I
do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes
when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look
into it.

Spiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible.
We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the
creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical
studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of
spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure
the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the
future.